How Do You Stop Yourself From Becoming Jaded?

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Why are people so weird about attraction? It’s the most natural thing in the world—to be drawn to other people. We spend all this time trying to define beauty when what we should be doing is expanding beauty, seeing beauty in all.

It’s always so jarring to me when someone makes a comment that another person is “ugly.” I’m not saying this to be on some high horse or anything, but I genuinely do not evaluate people in that way so it’s always so uncomfortable when I’m around someone who does, who sees people as beautiful and ugly, worthwhile and not, valuable and not. It truly does not occur to me to look at another person and determine their hotness rating on a scale of one to ten. I think I do a pretty good job of discerning between someone who I find attractive versus someone I don’t find attractive without adding a value judgment to the latter. Just because someone isn’t attractive to me does not make them ugly. That seems like an ugly way to look at the world.

I’ve always been fascinated by attraction, mainly because I’ve found myself attracted to so many different people throughout my life. I don’t have a type. I think I can probably find something I enjoy in every person I meet, unless that person just has an ugly heart, but even then, I can understand that. This world does not breed happiness. We do not live in a world that will teach you how to love, so I can understand pain and all the many ways it gets expressed, even if a symptom of that person’s pain is to be an insulting, insufferable tyrant. That is their prerogative. I personally don’t want my pain to be expressed by inflicting pain onto others, but I guess it would be disingenuous for me to judge. I’m sure that how I’ve dealt with my wounds has hurt others. I don’t know.

I think all this attraction and beauty for all makes me sound like I belong in the 70s with the hippies. I mean, maybe I do. My parents were hippies. Hell, my dad went to Woodstock, I think. He once sold weed to Jimi Hendrix, no joke. (He’d kill me if he knew I just wrote that, but oh well, Jimi’s dead [RIP] and my dad needs that story to live on forever, because it’s the best.) Maybe I’ve got a little of that 70s flavor imprinted onto me. Maybe I’m just hoping we can remember how to love again, how to see each other in the light, instead of imposing all our conditioning and opinions onto each other and then claiming each one of us is wrong. I think I still have hope that there’s a little sense of respect, acceptance, tolerance, and love in all of us and all we need to do is expand upon it, make that larger and more prominent than our hate and intolerance and disrespect. That little muscle is there, it just never gets flexed. There are too many opportunities to hate, too many reasons, too much of an echo chamber filled to the brim with bitter, jaded, hopeless souls who only look in the mirror or see the other bitter, jaded, hopeless souls.

I think sometimes I’m never really that sad for my own life. I get weighed down by how much anger and pain there is in this world. I get sad when I realize that so many people have lost hope and then I understand how that can happen, which makes it even sadder somehow. But where are we without our hope? Without love? Where do we end up if we subscribe to hate and hopelessness? Where does that leave us? I choose love because, to me, there’s really no other option. I don’t want my life to be overcome by the toxicity of hate. I can’t do it. I can’t let my life become that. So, even when I find myself jealous and spiteful and angry and judgmental and gossipy and terrible in a lot of ways—because I certainly can be all those things and more—I have to come back to love. I have to remember that love is purifying, while hate feels like my little boat is sinking and I have to keep plugging up the holes in order to float a while longer. I just don’t see any glory in turning bitter or spiteful or hopeless. It’s not worth it, even if there is evidence all around trying to lure me in.

I choose love because it’s really the only choice. It’s the only light in this world. It’s the only place, feeling, thought, space, which counteracts the ugly. And, I need that. I really, really need that.

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